Let's Talk About.... The Maeve

Maeve is the classic denim blue jeans jacket, so I found some fabric to compliment her with blues and pinks, in a painterly flower design. The cotton fabric comes from a summer skirt of mine that I wore in the 90’s. I bought it from a charity shop in West Bridgford, where we were living at the time. I must have been drawn to it, as pink and blue seem to be my ‘go to’ colours. 

We moved to West Bridgford in 1991 and our particular area is called Lady Bay. We were just up the road from Trent Bridge cricket ground, Nott’s Forest football ground, and the river Trent. Lady Bay is a wedge shaped area developed at the end of the 19th century, with the streets divided into a grid system. It was full of orchards and the building plots were divided up and built on over several decades. It was stipulated that the plots were no smaller than a certain size, so each house had a decent sized garden, and only detached or semi-detached could be built. No terraced housing here. If you were lucky there might be an old fruit tree in your garden, and maybe even a brick fruit store. Also the roads were named after the developers family.

We lived on Gertrude Road, and our house, a 3 bed semi-detached house, was built in 1926. We didn’t have any fruit trees in our garden, but next door but one had a magnificent beautiful pear tree with splendid blossom in the spring. 

We bought our house from the estate of a lady, the owner, who had recently passed away. Her parents bought the house, new, in 1926, when she was a child, and she lived there all her life. There had been not much updating over the years. When it was built electricity was still a new fangled invention. Don’t worry, we did have electricity, but we also had lead gas pipes popping out the wall, for your gas lights to be attached to. We hadn’t quite decided how to tackle these, as we were renovating the house, until the issue was forced upon us. My hubby inadvertently punctured one of the pipes in the wall, only to discover the smell of gas (!!) still in the pipes. With a baby and toddler, and cooking dinner at the time, it did feel like a bit of a drama. 

You can shop The Maeve here.